Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Dr. Marty Makary blasted public health officials on Monday for dire predictions on the spread of COVID-19 that he said may have caused a loss of “credibility” with the public.
Fox News anchor Charles Payne brought Makary on the “Your World” segment after playing clips from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky warning of another potential surge and senior White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci pointing to Europe as evidence another significant wave could happen in the United States.
“Is there a danger in losing credibility when the medical establishment, you know, makes these sort of warnings to us?” Payne asked. “At some point maybe we may need the warning, but it feels like they’re walking a really tight rope here.”
WATCH:
“You know, you can only cry wolf so many times, and the reality is we’re very different from Europe,” Makary responded. “It used to be that we were lagging Europe about four to six weeks and whatever happened there was a preview of what was gonna happen in the United States. But things have really changed since then.”
The Johns Hopkins professor argued that Europe has “much lower rates” of both natural and vaccinated immunity, and thus has “more people susceptible.”
“So I don’t think it’s honest for public health officials to sort of use fear to tell people we could flare into another surge,” he continued. “There are fewer susceptible people left out there.”
Payne and Makary went on to discuss how the “element of fear” could be being used as a political weapon because of what the Fox News anchor described as “all of the money sloshing around.”
“I would hate to see that interfere with pure public awareness about things like the vaccinations and reopenings,” Payne said. (RELATED: More Americans Now Fully Vaccinated Against COVID-19 Than Have Been Confirmed Infected)
Makary then pointed to several scary predictions from health experts that turned out to be untrue.
“Remember the twindemic, how influenza was going to combine with COVID and cause a catastrophic epidemic from those two in combination?” he asked. “Didn’t happen. We didn’t have flu that year. And remember the surge on top of a surge that was supposed to happen over the summer? People are getting a sense that the risk is declining and they’re actually correct. And I think a lot of this stuff is causing people to lose credibility with the public health community.”
A poll from as early as September 2020 showed that trust in the CDC tumbled 30 points from the beginning of the pandemic, as has been previously reported. It should also be noted that while the pandemic appears to be declining on many fronts, it remains ongoing and has so far killed more than 500,000 Americans.
